On a quiet stretch of Park Slope’s Fifth Avenue, designer Christine Alcalay‘s atelier sits inviting, intimate and unmistakably Brooklyn. Racks of blouses, jackets and vintage-buttoned trousers line the space — proof of what locals already know: the woman behind the clothes runs her business the way she designs, slowly, deliberately and with a soulfulness that can’t be mass-produced.
But Alcalay’s story begins long before her name appeared on a storefront.
“My story goes way back,” Alcalay told Brooklyn Paper. “It goes back to when I first came to the country with my mom as a Vietnamese immigrant.” Her mother, unsure how to navigate a new city and language, took a job in a Queens garment factory. Child care was not an option.
“I actually started in Queens sweatshops because my mom couldn’t afford childcare, so I would just go to the factory with her every single day.”
Those long hours spent watching her mother sew, mend, cut and hustle were formative — and often mischievous.
“She would give me a jacket or something to cut off, and I’d snip holes and cut the sleeves off,” Alcalay laughed.
But the joy of making things lived alongside the realities of struggle. For years, Alcalay resisted following her mother into the fashion industry.
“I was actually very anti going into fashion for a long time ’cause I had like watched her kind of struggle for so long, and the amount of like hours that she would just pour into what she was doing,” she said.
Eventually, she said, the choice stopped feeling like a choice at all.
“In a way, I felt like it picked me. I wanted to take what she started with — learning the craft of it — into a completely different level.”
By 13, she’d decided to attend the High School of Fashion Industries in Chelsea. Then came Parsons School of Design, Parsons Paris and a series of internships and textile jobs that made her, as she put it, “already like a veteran in the industry” by the time she graduated.
Retail came next — because Alcalay loved selling as much as she loved sewing. A job at a made-to-measure boutique on Madison Avenue opened her eyes to fashion’s intimate, detail-driven side. She eventually opened her first shop, KIWI, on a quiet Park Slope side street with a fellow employee and future business partner.
That was 23 years ago.
Building a Brooklyn fashion ecosystem
When Alcalay first moved to Brooklyn from Inwood, Park Slope was unfamiliar terrain. She said it took her and her husband a “really long time” to get to know the neighborhood. They spent many nights painting walls, installing carpets and racks — even sleeping in the store with their dog.
But the welcome was not immediate.
“I remember opening up, and someone from the neighborhood walked up to the store and said to me, ‘Well, good luck because this neighborhood doesn’t like to spend money.’ And it really burst my bubble,” she said.
What followed proved that neighbor wrong. Brooklyn showed up — slowly, but loyally.
“Week by week, year by year, our community really started to support us.”
KIWI eventually expanded, then expanded again. Fig, a menswear shop, opened next door. In 2022, Alcalay debuted her namesake boutique, Christine Alcalay, on Fifth Avenue. She said it “took me 20 years to get to this space, where everything we have in the shop is things that I’ve designed with just a few supporting brands.”
Through recessions, COVID-19 and constant change, one thing remained: “Our community always shows up, even when it’s hard.”
A designer devoted to the Garment District
Alcalay produces nearly all her collection in the Garment District — by choice, not convenience.
“I grew up in sweatshops around NYC, and the way I do things is slow and steady,” she said.
Mass production, overseas minimums and fast-fashion timelines don’t match her ethos. “You can’t make that in bulk; you can only make it one by one.”
Both factories she uses are women-owned. One is run by a woman who worked alongside Alcalay’s mother decades ago. They essentially built their businesses in parallel, she said.
Local production also means immediacy.
“I can run up and speak to the makers,” she said. “I can immediately say, ‘I’d like you to take it in exactly one quarter of an inch. You can’t do that overseas.”
The result, she said, is craftsmanship revealed not through flash but through fit — the lining, the stretch, the feel.
“If you look at a jacket from a distance, you may not see it immediately, but you will feel it if you put it on.”
Supporting the Garment District, she said, feels like honoring her own history.
“If it were ever to not exist anymore, I’m not really sure I would want to continue because I wouldn’t be able to do it the way I do it now.”
Growing slowly, by design
Three years into running her namesake space, Alcalay is thinking about the future with the same patience that has guided everything else.
“If I were to grow, I think it would grow very similarly to everything else. I’m definitely a slow burn.”
Her next step? Another brick-and-mortar, somewhere with the same “small village mindset” as Park Slope.
“The Christine Alcalay brand is already there, so I’d love to continue this model in other neighborhoods.”
But growth, she said, will always come second to intention.
“I really love how small we do things and what a huge impact we have by doing it that way,” she said.
Christine Alcalay is located at 316 Fifth Ave., between second and third streets, in Park Slope.
